Are bots/spammers a problem?
Asked by
Smashley (
12573
)
May 17th, 2021
I’m interested in other people’s experiences.
It seems like we’re at a ratio of 10:1 or so, dummy new accounts to real ones. That said, besides the constant weeding, does their presence get in the way of your fluthering? I haven’t personally had much trouble, but I wonder sometimes. Do we get political stooge accounts? Do we ever get hit by paid agents of some political entity? Do questions ever get hit so hard by spam they aren’t useful anymore? Are jellies ever targted by scammers? Is anyone using stooge accounts to inflate support for a point of view?
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6 Answers
I think our level of spam is enough to keep the mods busy, but it doesn’t seem to be overwhelming.
It doesn’t bother me.
I flag spam here pretty much daily as do some others. It’s generally people selling things and fairly obvious.
Seems like there are sometimes a few that are slightly tricky to distinguish from a real question, which people answer even though they might be spam, though that’s often ok anyway.
I haven’t detected political stooge accounts per se. I think it’d be hard to achieve anything worth the effort with such an attempt here.
There have been some recurring trolls, though the moderators tend to be on the ball with that.
All I ever see and flag are spammers selling things or directing you to a website. I’ve flagged one already today and see a few more have been flagged now.
Political spammers would be interesting, especially here, as we pretty much know each other and our leaning’s. They’d have to be good to get by all of us before we pick them to pieces haha!
It isn’t as bad as it was a couple years ago. We haven’t had one for The World’s Best Appliance Center in Hyderabad in quite a while, and it has been a few months since we had services offered in Dubai.
The mods do a good job of cleaning them out when flagged.
More annoying is the one recurring troll that pops up about every three weeks with attacks on one member.
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